Amazon S3

Create the account

1. Sign up at aws.amazon.com. It asks for a card and a phone number and verifies both.
2. Sign in to the AWS Console. Use the region selector at the top right to pick the region you want the backup in — remember its code, such as eu-west-1.

Create a bucket

1. Open the S3 service and click Create bucket.
2. Name it (unique across all of AWS) and confirm the region.
3. Leave Block all public access on and Bucket Versioning off unless you want it, then Create bucket.

Create a user with access to that bucket only

Root account keys should never be used by an application. An IAM user with a policy naming one bucket is the right key to hand SimDrive.

1. Open the IAM service → Users → Create user. Name it "simdrive". Do not tick console access.
2. On Set permissions, choose Attach policies directly → Create policy, switch the editor to JSON, and paste a policy that allows s3:ListBucket on arn:aws:s3:::your-bucket and s3:GetObject, s3:PutObject, s3:DeleteObject on arn:aws:s3:::your-bucket/*. Name it, create it, and attach it to the user.
3. Finish creating the user, open it, and go to Security credentials → Create access key. Choose "Application running outside AWS".
4. Copy the Access key ID and the Secret access key, or download the CSV — the secret is shown once.

A user limited to one bucket cannot list your buckets, so SimDrive asks you to type the name. Add s3:ListAllMyBuckets on arn:aws:s3:::* to the policy if you want the list.

Enter it in SimDrive

1. Settings → Storage → Connect storage → Amazon S3.
2. Region: the region code, such as eu-west-1. Leave the endpoint alone — the SDK finds the right host from the region.
3. Access key ID and Secret access key: the pair you copied.
4. Click Connect, then Choose folders to back up.